Mac: I need a bone.
Nanny: Why do you need a bone?
Mac: To chew.
Nanny: Boys don't chew on bones, dogs do.
Mac: But they taste like cheese.

While reading a book and pointing to all the babies:
He's sad. He's mad. He's happy. He's cold. He's frustrated.

While showing me his (very obviously dead) cricket
Me: Is that your cricket?
Mac: I caught him!
Me: Is he dead?
Mac: Nope, he's ok.
Me: Is he sleeping?
Mac: No, he's fine.
Me: Are you sure?
Mac: I like crickets.
Me: If he's dead we need to get rid of him.
Mac: Flush him down the toilet.
Me: Yeah, we could do that.
Mac: He'll find Nemo!

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Two months have flown by in the blink of an eye. Just a few short weeks ago I was big and round and not so patiently awaiting your arrival. And now you're here, warm and snuggly, sweet and loving, and I can no longer imagine life without you. You are such a wonderful addition to our family and we are all just madly in love with you.

This month you have really turned on the charm, making it impossible to get too frustrated with you, even when you're at your worst. In the last two weeks we've been dealing with a nightly fussy period from about 6:00 - 10:00 p.m. Fussy doesn't exactly adequately describe your frustration and you let us know how miserable you were with violent protests and screaming. It broke our hearts. It's so hard to see your baby in any kind of pain or not happy.

We thought it was gas and tried everything from gas drops, infant massage, leg bicycling, bouncing, swaddling, sucking, swinging, white noise, music, gripe water, warm washcloths, etc. Nothing seemed to work. Then, just when we were about at our wits end, at the suggestion of a friend, we put you to bed hours earlier than normal, you slept right through your fussy period and basically through the night. I guess you were just overly tired and pissed off at us for keeping you up during all the chaos of dinner, bath and bedtime. Who knew you just wanted to sleep more and have some quiet time to yourself?! That's my girl!

So (knock on wood), you've done much better in the sleep department over the last few days. Right now we're putting you down sometime around 6:30 p.m., after a bath and a bottle of breastmilk. You sleep until about 11:00 p.m., when your dad gives you another bottle (while I'm in bed) and then you both go to bed. You wake up one more time, usually around 4:00 a.m. for your second feeding of the night and (most of the time), you go back to sleep quickly and sleep until around 7:00 a.m. All in all, that's not bad. I'll take that every day over what we went through with your brother. I'd love it if we could eventually drop that 4:00 a.m. wake up, but as long as you go right back to sleep, it's not too awful. Especially when there are episodes of Friday Night Lights to watch in the middle of the night. We're both big Tim Riggins fans. Swoon.

When you're not freaking out, you're such a great eater. I'm not exactly sure how much you're getting when you breastfeed, but you can put down a 4 ounce bottle like champ and are probably ready to graduate to the big bottles. You are packing on the pounds these days and have developed some pretty outstanding thigh rolls. At your six week appointment you were just over 11 pounds and 22.5 inches long, which put you in the 75th percentile for weight and height. Keep it up, peanut. You feel very solid to me and I love that you're growing so big and strong.

Also at your six week appointment you got three shots, which sent you into an absolute fit of fury and rage. My lands, you were pissed off. I've never seen you so hysterical and inconsolable. Even the nurses came in multiple times to check on you to make sure everything was ok. I could not get you calmed down for anything and ended up in tears myself. Eventually you just cried yourself out and fell asleep in the car on the way home. I wasn't sure either one of us was going to make it. This makes me terrified of the next time you have to get a shot. I think your dad should take you.

You've been a rockstar breastfeeder up until this past week and I'm not sure what happened or what changed. Right around the height of your nightly tantrums you completely stopped breastfeeding. Again, I thought it was gas, since every time I'd lay you down to eat you would cry hysterically like you were in pain. The only way you'd eat was sitting up and out of a bottle. I was so sad about what was going on and very disappointed (in myself) that perhaps our breastfeeding journey was ending so soon. I continued to pump and was determined to at least keep you on breastmilk for a while and kept trying to reintroduce the breast to you at each feeding. Every time you'd reject it I'd take it so personally. I guess it's easy to get your feelings hurt when it's such an emotional bonding experience. But we pushed though and the last few days you've gone back to breastfeeding like nothing ever happened. I didn't realize how much I wanted it to work out until it was looking like it might not. I'm so glad we're on the other side of that struggle and I hope we can continue this for a while longer. Nursing strikes are no fun.

Right around six weeks you started smiling at us and it's just about the greatest thing I've ever experienced. You are so generous with your smiles and just love it when people talk to you and interact with you. You make such adorable faces and I love all your expressions. You're also talking and cooing a bit more these days, usually at the fan or a dog. You're still pretty quiet (at least compared to your brother), but when you do talk, it's absolutely adorable.

You are still a wonderful snuggler and love being held. You're hardly ever put down during the day, which none of us mind. You're so sweet and pretty easy going. You love music and your dad plays songs for you and sings to you every night. You're really strong for a baby and can easy hold your head up and yourself upright when in our arms. No floppy baby here. You also have one of the strongest grips I've ever experienced and I've lost quite a bit of hair and a necklace to your vice-like grip.

You absolutely love watching your brother and you just smile like crazy when he's around. I think you're going to be his biggest fan. He's really coming around to you lately and tells us all the time that he likes you (he's in a stage where he tells us everything he likes nonstop). That's definitely a big improvement! He still cries occasionally when one of us holds you when he wants our attention, but he's doing so much better and is usually ok with it after his initial frustration. He likes it when you go on walks with us and doesn't seem to mind that you're around, so long as you're not crying. That still freaks him out and he makes a scrunchy face and says, "Mim's sad. Mommy feed her."

I'm still not sure who you look like these days. I have a hard time seeing myself in you, but I do see some family resemblance. I think you look like your dad quite a bit, but mainly I guess you look mostly like Mac. You still have blue/grey eyes, which show no inclination of turning brown yet. Your hair (what little you have) is still dark, but has a hint of red in it when we're outside. You have a darker complexion than either me or your father, so we have no idea where that came from. But no matter who you look like, you're absolutely gorgeous. Everyone that meets you comments about what a beauty you are and we couldn't agree more. I swear you get prettier by the day.

I feel like you're already such a big kid and no longer my tiny little baby. Maybe it's because I'm pretty sure (your dad is 100% sure) you're our last baby, but I'm just not ready for you to grow up yet. A big part of me was always looking forward to the next stage with your brother, but this time, I'm not ready to move on. I could stay right here (and on maternity leave) forever. It's been so nice having so much time with you and your brother these last few weeks. And having the nanny here with us all to help out has been absolutely wonderful (otherwise I'd never get these posts up). If there was a way I could stay home (or work from home) and keep her here with us, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Going back to work is going to be such a rude awakening. I'm going to miss our snuggle sessions like crazy.

So for now I'm just trying to soak up every second I can with you. I take a million photos of you a day with the hope that someday I'll be able to get through them all. I spend hours just holding you, kissing your head and cheeks. I can't get enough of your baby smell and wish I could bottle it up and save it forever. I try to memorize your face - that tiny little upturned nose, your beautiful full lips, those chubby cheeks and your gorgeous round blue eyes. I love that you'd rather be in my arms than anywhere else in the world - that makes me feel like a million bucks.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I love you. More than you'll ever know. Thank you for being mine.

Love,

Your mama

Likes:

- being held
- moving

- snuggling

- sleeping

- Mac

- eating

- baths

- music/singing
- being outside

Dislikes:

- dirty diapers

- being cold

- being tired

- being put down
- being still

Firsts:

- first major holiday (Labor Day)

- first trip to PetSmart and Hobby Lobby

- first birthday party

- first time sleeping in your own crib/room

- first time running with daddy

- first smile
- first trip to my hometown
- first time meeting your great-grandmother
- first picnic in the park

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Hi everyone! Today I'm honored and thrilled to be the featured Instagram guest poster for Emily over at Dear Owen & Co. for her Tours on Tuesday series. Please feel free to follow along as I post some of my favorite photos of my kids' spaces. You can see a few more details of Mim's nursery, a few shots of Mac's room and a sneak peek of our basement playroom (yet to be blogged about).

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may remember the week-by-week photo book that I did while I was pregnant with Mac (HERE). I absolutely love the way it turned out - it's so much fun to look back on that time in my life and read about what we were doing and how excited we were to meet our first baby.

Being just as excited the second time around, I wanted to do the same thing for Mim. I kept a similar layout, but made it a bit different, with fewer colors and more photos. Since she is the second child, I tried really hard to make sure the descriptions were mainly about her and the pregnancy and not about what Mac was doing, but sometimes those were one in the same. I tried to keep this updated as the pregnancy progressed (each week), because pregnancy brain makes it really hard to even remember what you had for dinner that day. If I didn't stay on top of it, I'd never remember what we did a month ago. If I didn't have time to update it, I made sure to write things down on the calendar, which I'll stick in the book and put in Mim's keepsake box.

Once again, I'm absolutely thrilled with the way the pregnancy book turned out. I made it with Blurb (see the preview here),which has really easy software to use and the quality of the book is fantastic. I can't wait to be able to give this to her one day (maybe when she's expecting a baby) and go through it with her. Makes me all weepy just thinking about it...

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Last week I showed you the amazing busy bag we received from Emily of Dear Owen (HERE). Today, I'm going to be sharing a quick tutorial on how to make the busy bags we sent to Ethan of Schue Love. If you checked out Natasha's post, you saw that we sent 2 games - a personalized memory game with photos and a Brown Bear heads & tails matching game. These are both really incredibly easy to make and only require a printer and some card stock.

First up, the personalized photo matching game. I started by stealing borrowing some adorable photos of Ethan and his family from Natasha's blog. Any photos will do, but portrait orientation ones worked better for the layout I chose. I picked 12 pictures and then made a collage of them on Picmonkey.com. I use Picmonkey for all my collages - super easy to use and basic collages and editing are free. Once I had the photos in a collage where they were all exactly the same size and spacing, I just printed them out on my home printer.

I cut them out, glued them to some red cardstock to make them all uniform and more durable. Viola!

This game can be used in two different ways. Since Ethan's still young, this can be a matching game. Mix up the cards face-up and have him find the cards that match. Once he's a bit older, he can flip the cards over and use them as a memory game. Easy peasy!

The second busy bag we created was a heads and tails matching game using the animals from the popular and beloved Eric Carle book Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See. Again, this one is so easy it really doesn't need an explanation. I printed out the animals from a printable that I found HERE, mounted them on cardstock and cut them in half. This couldn't be any easier.

I love this busy bag activity because it can also be used to teach different concepts. Not only does your toddler work on the heads and tails matching, but you can use it to teach colors, sounds, animals, etc.

So there you have it...the world's easiest busy bag activities! As I previously mentioned, busy bags can be as elaborate or simple as you want. There's no right or wrong way to do them - if they keep your toddler busy for a few minutes, they're a winner in my book.

If you'd like more busy bag tutorials, make sure to check out the other bloggers participating: